Pulitzer-Prize winner Charles Simic is a Serbian-American poet, essayist and former poetry editor of the Paris Review. In 2007 Simic was appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Writing for the November 5th edition of The New York Review of Books, Simic, who writes often about American politics, describes his reactions to both the Republican and Democratic debates. Although significantly kinder to the Democrats, his essay, uncompromising and honest, spares no one completely. Because the majority of it is behind a paywall available only to subscribers, the following excerpts will hopefully provide a sense of the entirety.
The most glaring contrast in comparing the Republican and Democratic debates is the sheer amount of utterly contrived, fake hysteria deliberately ginned up by the Republicans, who, as Simic puts it:
[U]sed their allotted time trying to outdo each other in scaring Americans out of their pants by warning them about enemies everywhere, from illegal immigrants pouring across our borders, selling drugs and sex and bringing all kinds of disease, to jackbooted government agents wrestling guns out of the hands of mothers protecting their children from thugs breaking into their homes...
All this when they were not raising alarms about living babies being chopped up here at home by Planned Parenthood employees and having their body parts sold, or promising to close federal agencies that protect consumers and to dismantle regulations that stand in the way of banks and businesses, while getting rid of entirely or significantly reducing most of the programs for the less fortunate, from Obamacare to Social Security and Medicare.
Simic concludes from this what should be obvious--but is for some reason never actually stated--by the U.S. media in its "fair and balanced" coverage of our two political parties:
One expects imbecilities and outright lies from politicians running for office, but not so much undisguised meanness and desire to hurt people. Many of the conservatives we saw seemed moved by nothing as much as hatred. Women, young people, blacks, immigrants, gays, liberals, teachers—the list could go on for pages. The impression I had was that there was a wish to see the lives of millions and millions of their fellow citizens made miserable. The audience loved it. Applause greeted many of these heartless pronouncements. They didn’t sound to me like a crowd pining to elect a future president of a constitutional democracy.
In contrast to the mean-spiritedness shown by the Republicans (and their voter base), the Democratic debate proved to be a study in informing the public about "issues that many Americans care about and the Republican Party either ignores or dismisses with contempt:"
The candidates didn’t disappoint. They talked about gun control, the Middle East, the power of Wall Street, student loans, undocumented immigrants, global warming, Black Lives Matter, Social Security, the Patriot Act, government surveillance, and the widespread corruption that’ll keep anything from happening as long as there is no campaign finance reform.
Acknowledging he doesn't fully trust Hillary to follow through on progressive issues which collide with her own ambition, Simic nevertheless credits her with emphasizing investing in the country's infrastructure, science and technology and her plans to accelerate job growth. He also praises her stated desire to require paid family leave, which he correctly notes is a right afforded to families in every other Western democracy. He doesn't expect that she'll be able to accomplish much, but at least he places the blame for that correctly:
Of course, much of our media, which treat the fake economic remedies proposed by Republicans with the utmost gravity, will say that this is pie-in-the-sky liberalism with no chance of ever being enacted. With the corrupt Congress we have today, and many voters who have little knowledge of their country’s political past and our workers’ long and often thwarted struggle to unionize and be paid decent wages for their work, and the equally important history of how all those gains were gradually reversed in the last thirty to forty years, the cynical journalists are not wrong.
Simic has a better understanding of socialism than most American writers, having been born in the Eastern bloc and grown up in war-torn Europe. Upon coming to the U.S. in 1954 his first job out of high school was working in the mail room of the Chicago Sun-Times. He describes his recollection of talking to the dock workers who loaded the papers onto the trucks, and notes that a lot of what they taught him over the course of a year about the relationship between labor and capital sounded remarkably like what Bernie Sanders described during the debate. He was struck by the contrast between Sanders' response and Clinton's, when asked about their attitude towards capitalism.
The senator from Vermont took the question seriously and wondered aloud:
"Do I consider myself part of the casino capitalist process by which so few have so much and so many have so little by which Wall Street’s greed and recklessness wrecked this economy? No, I don’t."
Clinton then remarked that when she thinks about capitalism, she thinks “about all the small businesses that were started because we have the opportunity and the freedom in our country for people to do that and to make a good living for themselves and their families.” To call the owners of a corner grocery capitalists is ludicrous. They may be a family-owned business, but putting them under the same label as franchises and large corporations that have multiple operations in various locations is the kind of bullshit that makes one recoil.
Needless to say, this is not the type of reaction you will ever see from any significant American media source--nearly all of which, like Clinton, reflexively lump small business and corporate behemoths together under the unifying umbrella of Capitalism. Simic's simple point is that they are very different things. Viewing them in the same manner is a mistake, one that large corporations are only too eager to exploit whenever the subject of reining in corporate excesses is whispered in the halls of Congress.
He doesn't spare Sanders completely though, finding the Vermont Senator's excuse for not voting for the Brady Bill shallow and disingenuous ('baloney"), noting that his excuse that Vermont is a rural state was refuted by Martin O'Malley, who noted that Maryland managed to pass such legislation while still respecting the hunting tradition of those who lived in rural areas. Simic has a point here, but not a great one. As anyone familiar with both states knows, Vermont is not at all like the substantially more urban Maryland. More political clout would be expected from the urban centers in Maryland which have a stronger interest in gun control.
On foreign policy, however, Simic is very citical of Clinton, particularly her defense of the Libyan operation, particularly this quote:
And the Libyan people had a free election for the first time since 1951. And you know what, they voted for moderates, they voted with the hope of democracy. Because of the Arab Spring, because of a lot of other things, there was turmoil to be followed.
Simic isn't buying any of this revisionism about our well-intended but failed Libyan policy, nor should he. He sums up his feelings about both Democratic candidates with refreshing honesty. First, Clinton:
Talk about not learning anything from experience. If this is what she really believes, and if she sees the brutal fighting among Libyan tribes, militias, and others as caused in any large part by the Arab Spring, she’s ignoring the realities that have been reported, and she poses a risk that if she becomes president she may not avoid colossal failures of judgment.
As to Sanders, he sees what many of the rest of us have concluded:
[H]e’s too much of a realist, I believe, to imagine that he has a chance of becoming president and is running merely to enlighten the public about the realities that are being hidden from them by our corrupt politicians and our groveling media and to start a mass movement among the younger voters that would fight for the liberal values in which he believes.